"And the French envoy said that she will present several issues with the Israeli side concerned with the commencement of the execution of the Industrial zone such as easing movement in Bethlehem and the subject of providing the Industrial zone with sufficient electricity and water, in the hope that the Israelis will fulfill the promises they gave to facilitate and help the Palestinian economy." -- from this article
The "hope that the Israelis will fulfill the promises..."? Israel has scrupulously fulfilled all the promises it has made, ever since the 1948-1949 Armistice Agreements that set what are now known as the “1967 borders” that it was then willing, if the Arabs would agree, to make permanent. It was the Arabs who refused, because they had high hopes of attacking again. They wanted to have those lines regarded by what was not yet called, so hideously, the "international community," as most impermanent, as merely temporary armistice lines.
And nowadays that impermanence of Israel is in that phrase "first they must go back to the 1967 borders [i.e. armistice lines] and then we'll see." It is also in the Fatahstan phrase: "we are willing to choose peace as a strategic option" [meaning: we can't make open war just yet, but let's give the salami strategy that our "peace" means its piecemeal chance].
The regime of Sarkozy is run by several people who may be more favorable to Israel than the regime of Chirac, who has some very unusual expensive tastes (he is said to have needed, perhaps still needs, the simultaneous services of three call girls, and is rumored to have all kinds of money as far away as Japan). But essentially their willingness to pretend to believe in "the Palestinian people" – that is, the Gazan Arabs of Hamastan and the "West Bank" Arabs of Fatahstan, which means both the Fast and Slow Jihad Wings of those who have been endowed by the other Arabs with the task of being the Shock Troops of the Jihad against Israel, to be pursued now by this method, and now by that.
But they, like their more cynical predecessors, ignore the nature of Islam. And they do so at Israel's peril. And they do so to the continued and growing imperilment of France. Sarkozy proves to be excitable, not cool, not cunning, not farseeing. He is a sentimentalist, and that means he has limited value. Kouchner? Oh, he's a soixante-huitard kind of guy, better than most, but still a believer in something called the "international community" and still unwilling to see what the ideology of Islam, its meaning and menace, are -- right down to its last sura. That is why in France itself, the Sarkozy regime complacently points to the Muslim women it has put in place, as if it is Rachida Dati who counts, and not her ten siblings who also live in France, and are nothing like Rachida Dati. Sarkozy’s people are sentimentalists just like Bush, at that State of the Union Speech, where he pointed out some Iraqi woman, apparently pro-American -- whatever that means, in the Iraqi context, and whatever justification that kind of anecdotal evidence provides for the squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale in Tarbaby Iraq.
Sarkozy is a great disappointment. Those who became furious with me when I suggested at this website many months ago that one should Curb One's Enthusiasm about him, may wish to revisit their previous postings and reconsider that enthusiasm. On some things he's fine, but on the nature of Islam, he is mentally held in check by the 5-7 million Muslims in France. He can't allow himself to see Islam for what it is, and why, in the Jihad against Israel, any attempt to bolster or support the myth of the "Palestinian people," and to do anything that makes them able to continue their existence on life-support supplied by Western Jizyah, simply makes Israel's task more hellishly difficult. What is that task? In the "West Bank," it is to hold onto every square dunam of the "West Bank," including its invasion routes and its aquifers, and to make sure that a state of grim hopelessness sets in among the local Arabs, so that the most intelligent ones leave, and the rest simply accommodate themselves to the fact that they will not be winning, as they now hope to, their "state" and then...all of "Palestine."
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Related: Sarkozy Offers French Expertise, by Jack Engelhard.